Wadler's Blog

28.2.07

François Pottier, A modern eye on ML type inference: old techniques and recent developments. Lecture notes for the APPSEM Summer School, September 2005, Frauenchiemsee, Germany. The above link takes you to the slides of the talk; there is also an associated paper.

Many interesting ideas, including a constraint-based view of Hindley-Milner typing that includes 'let' generalization (something that I've sought ever since reading Mitchell Wand's lovely paper on the subject). Thanks to Wand for the recommendation.

An intriguing article, suggesting that the current Computing Science must evolve into a much broader discipline. Touches on a number of points, including principles vs. practices, ways in which computing must 'cross the chasm' (in the sense of Geoffrey Moore's book), why computing must focus on its customers, invention vs. innovation, and CS vs. IT. Thanks to Uday Reddy for recommending it.

11.2.07

Bruce Eckel argues that Flash is the new, new thing. He's particularly keen on Flex, which compiles Actionscript, a superset of ECMAscript, to run on Flash. I agree with him when he says "applications of any complexity using HTML, CSS and JavaScript are difficult and expensive to develop", and also agree that a big motivator for using Javascript or Flash is that there are far fewer installation problems than Java. Perhaps we should consider setting up Links to generate either Javascript or Flash. Thanks to Greg Morrisett for pointing me at the article.

9.2.07

Jane St. Capital, a financial firm, made a stir when they started to advertise for O'Caml programmers. Now they are running a summer project, loosely modelled on Google's Summer of Code, to spur development of O'Caml libraries and tools.